Back in action. Sort of.

Sorry for the outage. The internet has been out here for a couple of weeks. We have had pretty poor weather which I am sure has not helped the situation. Our internet works by beaming a signal about a mile across the lake to the satellite uplink station in the village (like a really beefy wireless router). This means that when the internet goes out we have a couple of options. First, we can use precious satellite phone minutes to sit on hold with our internet provider. This is pretty poor because it really burns up our minutes so we try to avoid it. Our second option involves sending someone across the lake in the boat to Julie's house. Then they can call tech support on a regular land line and radio back across the lake on the VHF with instructions. I am sure its pretty amusing for the village to listen to us hash out our computer problems over the radio. Well, that's what Conrad and I did the other day, and in the end we got it all working for now. I am leaving in two days to go back to California and see Tish for 10 days. Its a weird time to take a break because our summer is way more than half over and it will be a mad last two weeks when I get back from the states. But, I am really looking forward to it and Jen and Conrad probably want to get rid of me for a while anyway. (here is a view from the deck for Claire).

The weather has been so bad lately I haven't been taking the camera out of the case. Our last trip up to Black lake it was blowing ~20 knots and I wore a drysuit, which proved a wise choice. One of my projects this summer has involved collecting DNA from Dolly Varden fry in several small streams throughout the watershed. This has been fun because we get to go to places where the regular work never takes us. We even named some streams that weren't on the map. The collections were generally done with a backpack electrofisher as we hiked up the streams. This has been a great excuse to get out and hike around, something we don't get much of here. Normally we just ride around in boats all day and count some fish, occasionally cutting their heads open.